A boundary between two worlds? Community perceptions of former asylums in Lancashire, England.

Mental asylums are often depicted as dark, feared places. Since their mass closure in the 1990s, early 2000s, these imposing, now abandoned and decaying sites have commonly been presented as places of fear, torment and scandal. Yet slowly the negative perceptions surrounding them have receded. The former asylum can be seen as resolutely dark and yet becoming lighter at the same time. This chapter will explore the question of whether there is a boundary that exists between community and asylum as Gittins (1998) argued or whether the relationship, as more recent studies have explored, is more flexible and fluid (Bartlett & Wright, 1999; Mooney & Reinarz, 2009; Smith, 2006). It deepens this emerging re-interpretation by examining how those living and working around former asylum sites in two local communities in the North West of England (the former Lancaster Moor and Whittingham Hospitals) view their abandoned asylum as those sites progressed through conversion to residential accommodation. The study reveals the diverse meanings and interpretations of these sites, challenging the conventional interpretation of an, for all times and all purposes, stigmatisation.